Documenting tools necessary for GCC [draft]

[Zack Weinberg]

"David O'Brien" <obrien@FreeBSD.org> writes:

> I'd really like this to state a POSIX compliant shell, and list the exact
> POSIX spec (and year) that OS's must adhere to.

Not good enough.  The POSIX shell and make specifications were not
written with the aim of making it possible to write portable shell
scripts or makefiles.  They were written with the aim of making it
possible for all the Unix(TM) vendors participating in the process
to claim compliance with the standard without changing anything in
their shipped operating systems.  That means you can find blatant
semantic or even syntactic incompatibilities between shells or Make
implementations that claim to be POSIX compliant.  Examples have
been posted here in the past.

This MAY have been addressed in the 2001 revision, but I don't trust
that to be the case, and it's moot anyway; the 2001 revision is far
too new to be our baseline.

> Why can't GCC come out of the dark ages and state autoconf 2.5x?

Everyone who has tried to date has tripped over incompatibilities of
documented behavior between 2.13 and 2.5x and given up.  We agreed at
the BOF to bite the bullet and make it work, but that will take time.

zw